Well, one great thing about the tower at the High School for the Visual and Performing Arts is that it's so abstract it can be almost anything you like.

For D, it suggests

Wall-E, or a toy robot.

Sylvia Lavin of UCLA, said on the day after the election, in a public conversation with the head of the firm that designed the High School, Wolf Prix, that it reminds her of

Barack Obama.

Lavin said that in the 1960s Wolf Prix was angrier. Now he's figured out how to still be radical but a little softer. So Prix gets to build, and yet still foment change. (His firm is designing the new European Central Bank in Frankfurt; Prix hopes to create a new symbol for Europe.) Sylvia Lavin compared Prix to Barack Obama, and Obama's understanding of how to be an African-American man in the United States and not be angry, but rather, constructive. She said she will forever call this "the Obama Tower." Prix smiled.

He said the room at the top of the 140 foot tower was originally meant to be rented out to generate income for the school. The L.A. Unified School District has since balked at that idea and also at Prix's desire for the tower to hold L.E.D. signage - for advertising - to also bring in money to the school system. An artsy billboard, how L.A., don't you think?

Signage, and certain industrial aspects of the high school remind me of the work of L.A.-based architect Thom Mayne

such as his Caltrans Headquarters, just a few blocks from the new high school. Theirs is likely a mutual influence.

And Prix has one-upped Mayne if you think the swirl around his tower stands for the number 9, since after all, this is L.A. Unified School District High School #9.

Or does this tower suggest a local vernacular-

the tower of slides at the water park?

When Coop Himmelb(l)au's lead architect Wolf Prix spoke the other night in the auditorium/theater of the school, he rightly said that a High School for the Performing Arts could not just be boxes, and that arts students deserve a landmark, an icon.

So now, I see the tower as a West Coast

beacon.

Long live the Enlightenment. From sea to shining sea.

As for the title of this post, Wolf Prix has said he learned English by listening to songs by Bob Dylan.

Of what does the tower remind you?

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The L.A. arts high school, set to open next fall, will be Coop Himmelb(l)au’s second building in America, and it looks to be more interesting and better-suited to its purpose than their first US effort, a $30-million expansion of the Akron Art Museum. The cost for the five acre high school is said to be about $230 million. It will have space for some 1,600 students, many from surrounding low-income neighborhoods. The school is expensive, overbudget, delayed, and criticized for all those reasons. It stands just across a freeway from

the Rafael Moneo-designed cathedral, with its campanile, or tower. The two form a gateway as you are driving. Prix said he was told his tower could not be taller than Moneo's. I have already said that Caltrans by Thom Mayne/Morphosis is just a few blocks away, and just a few blocks up Grand Avenue you'll find the magnificent Disney Concert Hall by Frank Gehry. Kudos to L.A.